KickStarter SKALD: Against the Black Priory - retro RPG inspired by Ultima

[Tacgnol]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

If your combats are lasting more than two rounds in this game then you're doing something wrong.

 

[Mortmal]

Mages are quite useful late game where a lot of enemies have resistance to physical damage. I'm making quite good use of the mage companion you get late game for these sections.

I specced her for Air and Fire. Fireballs seem to do a decent chunk of damage.

Any experience with the gishes? I love gishes generally, but in games like this with scaling leveling they can be a trap. I'm worried Champion or Battlemagos will be underpowered later. Champion seems like a shoe-in for PC in this game though.

Read the damn thread, Grunker. Everyone told you that mages, especially battle magos, are underpowered, from the beginning. Tyranicon already posted about it too. But given that,even by Codex standards, you are a special kid, it's my duty to enlighten you once more.

 

[Mortmal]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

If your combats are lasting more than two rounds in this game then you're doing something wrong.

No, they dont but then you have to rest all the time, exit the map ,rest, when as others said a full party of officers or melee could simply steam roll it all.

 

[Robber Baron]

the music really elevates the game

 

[Trash Player]

Finished the game in 26.6 hrs according to Steam. Overall like it, the setting and tone, and don't regret d1p but can't help but feel it is more style over substance. Especially underwhelmed by the late game gameplay and the side dungeon filled with crit immune and physical resistant hp sponges.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I basically have all of today off, so I'm devoting it to Skald.

I was in a taffing mood, so I rolled a Street Rat Thief.

Just mucking about on the first map and exploring the submerged caves. One question, the caves are just one map, right?

Oh, and some good news for the holdouts: Skald runs fine on Windows 7.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Finished my run and enjoyed it a lot. There were bugs and balancing issues but I hope they'll be ironed out soon -- there was only one case where it was a problem for me.

The trader in the Deluxe Edition adds some variety to the equipment and that's about it -- he's not necessary to finish the game since you can items of similar quality 15 minutes later or so.

I didn't play the full version until the backers received the game, so it was nice to discover it with other players and see how my work meshed with it.

NGL I might sound like a shill, but working on it was a blast and one could do much worse with their big debut.

 

[Mortmal]

I basically have all of today off, so I'm devoting it to Skald.

I was in a taffing mood, so I rolled a Street Rat Thief.

Just mucking about on the first map and exploring the submerged caves. One question, the caves are just one map, right?

Oh, and some good news for the holdouts: Skald runs fine on Windows 7.

Yes one map but...two entrances with differrent areas to reach

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

Im lvl 10 and have 80 mana. More than enough to clean the screen with inferno

 

[Tyranicon]

Im lvl 10 and have 80 mana. More than enough to clean the screen with inferno

I feel like battlemagos is specifically designed to just drop infernoes (mapwide AOE damages everything). They suck at melee (only access to light weapon feats, 1 pitiful self buff), they get an AOE fire resist, they get only 1 Tier 4 fire spell and it's a fire cone...

Gishes are quite bad in the game. Champion and Hospitaller are basically the same class and just some kind of underpowered paladin with lay on hands (the only useful part of their kit), and unless you abuse inferno, battlemagos is also bad (you can cast fireball multiple times per round, but its damage scaling is poor).

Compared to armsmaster or ranger, who just dominate everything. Rangers especially can chain kill the entire map, have a huge range, and can shoot through terrain (bug? if so that's a pretty big bug lol). The mark skill even heals and inspires your entire party lol. Combat is simple so it's mostly just a DPS race most of the time.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Gishes are quite bad in the game.

It's funny because I haven't started the game yet, I've just fired it up a few times to examine the various class talent trees, etc. and that was the conclusion I came to. Like they don't even look good with the things that are missing. I couldn't figure out why, outside of RP considerations, anyone would want to use one instead of going pure mage or pure warrior.

Not really glad to see, but it's interesting to see that assumption borne out in actual gameplay.

 

[notpl]

On the other hand, the Officer is so good it nearly renders Armsmaster obsolete. I think the strongest possible party would probably just be 3 officers and 3 rangers, not that you'd ever need it.

 

[Tyranicon]

Gishes are quite bad in the game.

It's funny because I haven't started the game yet, I've just fired it up a few times to examine the various class talent trees, etc. and that was the conclusion I came to. Like they don't even look good with the things that are missing. I couldn't figure out why, outside of RP considerations, anyone would want to use one instead of going pure mage or pure warrior.

Not really glad to see, but it's interesting to see that assumption borne out in actual gameplay.

The spell list is hidden from you so that's the only real reason. Seems like a trap choice, especially as there's no build reset option and the game is long enough for me not to want to restart.

I was hoping for some kind of uber self-haste. The current one that Battlemagos gets is a minor strength buff +1 extra attack for one round. And that's it.

Gishes work entirely around using magic to buff the shit out of your melee attacks. Think of the traditional dnd paladin with their smites, or bladedancer wizards, or any other gish build. Gishes are basically fighters but with more resource management.

Instead of giving the Battlemagos some tacky nuke combo, they really should've gotten a better self buff. Like three attacks per round, or the attacks deal fire damage, defensive stuff (because they basically have wizard HP), whatever.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Gishes are quite bad in the game.

It's funny because I haven't started the game yet, I've just fired it up a few times to examine the various class talent trees, etc. and that was the conclusion I came to. Like they don't even look good with the things that are missing. I couldn't figure out why, outside of RP considerations, anyone would want to use one instead of going pure mage or pure warrior.

Not really glad to see, but it's interesting to see that assumption borne out in actual gameplay.

The spell list is hidden from you so that's the only real reason. Seems like a trap choice, especially as there's no build reset option and the game is long enough for me not to want to restart.

I was hoping for some kind of uber self-haste. The current one that Battlemagos gets is a minor strength buff +1 extra attack for one round. And that's it.

Gishes work entirely around using magic to buff the shit out of your melee attacks. Think of the traditional dnd paladin with their smites, or bladedancer wizards, or any other gish build. Gishes are basically fighters but with resource management.

Instead of giving the Battlemagos some tacky nuke combo, they really should've gotten a better self buff. Like three attacks per round, or the attacks deal fire damage, defensive stuff (because they basically have wizard HP), whatever.

Yeah, fair enough. I was getting pretty into the weeds like increasing casting stats as much as possible in chargen and then checking out the details of the spell picks that were opening up, etc. It's why I asked if there's just documentation somewhere I wasn't finding (even went through the game folders and did a web search), because it was a super time consuming pain in the ass. I've played almost two hours, but haven't gotten out of chargen yet.

Granted, I always take a lot of time in chargen for this sort of thing if there's anything more than a pick class and RNG your stats sort of mechanic.

 

[Robber Baron]

So give it to me straight

is using

the ancient dagger from below the lighthouse affects anything in the long run?

 

[notpl]

No. It's worth quite a lot of gold to a collector NPC in chapter 2 and its stats aren't anything special compared to any other high-end magic dagger you'll eventually find, though.

 

[Darkwind]

How tactics-heavy is it on the scale of “- out of KotC”?

0/10? I'm now 8 hours in so have a really good feeling for the ebb & flow of combat. As others have pointed out, it is basically "trade blows until one side dies" unfortunately.

There are some -minor- tactics but they are brainlet tier like keeping your archers and mages on the backline. (Duh!) Thing is, there is no AI to speak of that I can see. This is why the summons spells can be exploited so heavily because you summon up 2 trash mobs and place them near the enemy. They will then sit there and chip away at the trash mobs you called while you mercilessly pelt them from range and then move your melee up to take swings at them from behind.

I'm guessing the code for the AI is as simple as "attack nearest enemy" and nothing more than that. There is no selective targeting, no tactics to speak of. Again, trade blows until someone dies is the extent of it.

The game is really more about the nostalgia / throwback element than anything else. I got it for $14 bucks, not going to complain at that price point. Had it been $24.99 I likely would have passed. I bought it in the hopes that a 'next game' would have a bit more meat & depth to it, we shall see...

 

[Darkwind]

I mean, what is the deal with people complaining about casters being bad? I don't regret playing a mage at all. Fire is pretty bad but the other 2 are gamebreakers.

Thing is... they are not really gamebreakers and maybe that is ok. Your attunement pool is so comically small that you are a 2 pump chump. Your guild-magos can turn the tide of "A" battle, yes, but then he has basically shot his load. You won't be doing that repeatedly. You are useless after that.

I suppose if you abuse the rest system or simply chug attunement potions this could become game-breaking but barring that, you have a strict limit on your usefulness in the form of your attunement pool which will give you 1 or 2 really heavy hitter spells then you are spent. You have no other really useful skills to fall back on so are dead weight to the party at that point.

 

[Modron]

They are probably playing it like how they played Infinity Engine games, resting after every encounter.

 

[notpl]

People saying attunement costs are too high are simply not crafting potions. I use spells without any hesitation in every encounter and top up with potions afterward, got ~70 left at the moment.

 

[Darkwind]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

Im lvl 10 and have 80 mana. More than enough to clean the screen with inferno

And nuke your own party too... so you are burning at least 1 round of combat and part of your attunement pool on group fire resistance just to "setup" your nuke. Is this efficient? Is this the height of magical gameplay? Seems kinda beat to me...

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I basically have all of today off, so I'm devoting it to Skald.

I was in a taffing mood, so I rolled a Street Rat Thief.

Just mucking about on the first map and exploring the submerged caves. One question, the caves are just one map, right?

Oh, and some good news for the holdouts: Skald runs fine on Windows 7.

Yes one map but...two entrances with differrent areas to reach

Dungeon in 1st area is all connected from inside too.

 

[Tyranicon]

I wouldn't say combat is bad exactly, but the majority of the combat I've been in is trash mobs and I'm going out of my way to avoid combat (especially the horrible random overworld encounters) which is never a good sign.

This is not a game you buy for the combat (which is super easy anyways). Seeing as how it's a retro nostalgiafest, that makes sense. Haven't come across too much reactivity either, it's usually just you fail/succeed a quest with little in the way of consequences.

But the writing (even with the enormous amount of typos) is very good and beats basically any other RPG released in the last 5 years. Characters are not Owlcat or Larian style cringefests. Exploration is fun. Music is top tier.

For 15$ it's a pretty good deal. They priced it appropriately.

 

[Darkwind]

People saying attunement costs are too high are simply not crafting potions. I use spells without any hesitation in every encounter and top up with potions afterward, got ~70 left at the moment.

Thing is, I CAN do that, but then, am I playing a tactical CRPG or fucking Diablo IV chugging mana potions like a retarded crack monkey? I'm guessing the latter but the game is trying to be the former. Are you an ARPG or a CRPG? You are wearing the skin of a CRPG but forcing ARPG gameplay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Hydro]

The game is really more about the nostalgia / throwback element than anything else.

This is what I was afraid of. Oh well. Skipping probably.